One of the big plusses of the Death Knight class is that all their skills are used often and interact together well thanks to the rune system. The downside of this however is that I have limited hotbar space, but need all the abilities readily available. One solution I have thought about is macroing together similarly used abilities, such as plague strike/icy touch, and mind freeze/strangulate. This however limits me in other ways if I only need one of the two.

Right now I am using abilities on 1-5, alt 1-5, ctrl 1-5, t, f, y, and one of my mouse buttons for death coil.

Does anyone have any good hotbar setups or creative solutions?

I use a scheme which allows me to position my hands as if I'm typing and gives me a large variety of easily accessible keys for abilities.

ESDF is movement.

Abilities are bound to:

12345

ZAQW

RTGB

XC

Furthermore, my ghoul commands are bound to Shift - TGBV (Attack, Stun, Huddle, and Follow me).

For abilities which are similar to another, I use Shift - Same Key. For instance, DK's have a 2 min ranged spell interrupt which is on 2. The melee instant version is shift - 2. Grasp pull target is 4 -- Command to attack (taunt) is Shift 4.

I now have a parry attack ability which I have bound to Shift - R. But I maybe try Mouse 4 or something quickly accessible.

I use the standard WASD set up from first person shooters for movement. I use a hotbar mod that allows you to set custom pages based on modifier keys, currently this is maccaroon. I then map all of my hotbars to the NUMBERPAD. Tabbing to select targets in my group or clicking them with the mouse allows me to move through multiple targets fast and gives me easy access to alt, ctr, and l. shift keys that gives me ~39 keys ( I also use the arrow keys for spell bindings). So once I am in position and ready to pull i stop using the mouse and have both hands on the keyboard. Try this and see if you like it it is good for pvp too.

I used to use a setup relying heavilly on the numpad for moves and the normal nmber keys for the rest, but this was on a normal keyboard. now I use a laptop, so the numpad was no longer an option. So I wanted a new setup that would be more comfortable.

I created this almost entirely for my DK too, but it mostly works on other classes.

WADX are my movement keys. W is forward, AD are strafe left and right, with shift making them turn, and X is backstep. Then, I use QEZC as well as SRF for my most important moves, and double that with shift which seems to work quite well. I put some CD abilities usually on 1234 and less important ones on shift 1234. This has worked incredibly for me so far. I mostly move with the mouse and AD for strafing.

I'd say deathknights more than just about any other class really benefit from the use of a speedpad like the Nostromo n52. Yeah, they take some time to get used to, but jesus do they ever make dealing with lots of hotkeys easier. Between that and a 7 button mouse, i don't even touch my keyboard 95% of the time, especially with ventrilo for communication.

It's interesting that not many people mention that they use shift keys as I find them very accessible in conjunction with 1 - 6

WASD - Movement

Abilities
123456
Shift+123456

Large Timed Cooldowns
F1 - Fx

Quick response keys - interrupts, silences etc
QERFTG / Shift + Aforementioned keys

Ghoul
CTRL + 1234 (Though i usually just leave him in def stance and he does his own job :-) )

I find that i barely use the pet stuff. So I don't have those custom bind. Default I think its Ctrl+12345.... I use

Movement: ESDF
123456
F1-3
QWRYAGZXCVBN

I use a 2-Thumb button mouse, but I use 1 of them for Ventrillo and the other one just sits there.... (I should probably do something with that). I think macro-ing the Plague Strike/Ice Touch doesn't give me enough information. Just a little question: Should I be looking at the runes rather than the skills? What do you look at?

I find myself being in a more rogue-like mentality when it comes to my DK - especially in a big battle where I really have to make sure i'm concentrating on my reactions. I have a set rotation (combo) i'll open with depending what role i'm playing or aoe'ing. I often find myself just bouncing between cooldowns in terms of my mentality.

I use runewatch mainly to check if I have a death rune up and where as well as my runic power, not so much for focusing on what runes are up as such.

using a g15 keyboard is nice too. for my DK i use the 18 macro keys almost exclusively. I've got all the ingame binds done to 1-0, then alt + 1-0.
for those who HAVE the g15, or a similar keyboard, I'd suggest a similar configuration.

g1-g6 are all "as needed" skills, on my DK they're things like IBF, blood tap, as well as attacks that i use less often such as and anything that i need at my fingertips but not something i do often enough.

g7 and g9 are the skills i spam a lot, 1 is my diseases upkeep macro (/castsequence plaguestrike, icy touch) the other is a macro that does obliterate or modified by my mouse button it'll do runestrike
g6 and g10-g12 are my movement keys, bound to the typical wasd.

g13-g18 are most of my out of combat type skills, as my hand is usually hovering over them. a few things would be path of frost, horn of winter, death pack, and my presence keys.

any suggestions would be nice too, I'm always looking for a better way to combine all my keys into a nice neat area :-D still not 80 yet, so don't know what other skills and combinations will be useful, but just from doing 5 man's, seems pretty nice. the perks of using the g-keys for it is for other things, you can still use the wasd configuration, swap to bar 2, and you're set for pvp or whatever you need.

I find I use just as many buttons as my mage. The major difference is the amount of button switching done when respecing to another tree. I.E Obliterate isn't used for unholy but is for other spec's.

Before it was just talented spells I made room for but now I need to switch in core abilities when respecing which can be a pain.

Also macroing abilities together helps. DK's have a lot of stuff off the GCD. Strangulate, Mind Freeze are 1 button, Rune strike attached to all melee attacks, Blood Tap attached to my main attack, and vampiric blood attached to deathstrike.
For leveling to 80 I even have the Orc racial macro'd to scourge strike since I forget to use it otherwise.

Like many players, I don't keep my action bars visible; instead, I look at my runes and have my most important cooldowns displayed on a separate area of the screen. However, I have run into a problem; when I turn into a ghoul due to Shadow of Death, the ghoul's abilities replace bar #1, but since I don't have bar 1 visible, I can't see these abilities or their cooldowns.

I would like to add a condition to Bartender4 so that it shows bar #1 only when I am a ghoul. Bartender supports the standard WoW macro conditions, but I have been unable to find out what (if it even exists) the macro-testable condition is for a death knight currently being under "Shadow of death".